The Disconcerting Popularity of Popular In/Justice in the Fizi/Uvira Region, Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo
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The disconcerting popularity of popular in/justice in the Fizi/Uvira region, Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo Article (Published Version) Verweijen, Judith (2015) The disconcerting popularity of popular in/justice in the Fizi/Uvira region, Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. International Journal of Minority and Group Rights, 22 (3). pp. 335-359. ISSN 1385-4879 This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/79006/ This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher’s version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and reuse: Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University. Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available. Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk international journal on minority and group rights 22 (2015) 335-359 brill.com/ijgr The Disconcerting Popularity of Popular In/justice in the Fizi/Uvira Region, Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo Judith Verweijen Researcher, Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala and Conflict Research Group, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium [email protected] Abstract This article analyses the disconcerting phenomenon of ‘popular in/justice’, or killings of citizens enacted by other citizens ‘in the name of justice’. It studies these practices in the Fizi/Uvira region in the conflict-ridden eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where they target either suspected criminals or presumed sorcerers. The article locates the causes for this phenomenon in certain transformations of socio-political space, notably the unsettling of customary and politico-administrative authority, dys- functional state-led justice and security services, and the militarisation of local gover- nance. These developments have compounded dispute processing and handling the occult, leading these processes to often turn violent. They also incentivise and enable politically and socio-economically marginalised yet demographically numerous groups to assert socio-political agency and engage in order-making. The article con- cludes by arguing that popular in/justice should be seen as an expression of such aspi- rations to exercise efficacious socio-political agency, thereby constituting a perverse form of democratisation. Keywords mob justice – witchcraft – customary authority – youth – eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo © JUDITH VERWEIJEN, 2015 | doi 10.1163/15718115-02203003 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 (CC-BY-NC 4.0) License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ 336 Verweijen 1 Introduction The phenomenon whereby citizens collectively kill a limited number of other citizens ‘in the name of justice’ is highly disconcerting. It evokes images of law- lessness and, especially when occurring in an African context, of barbarism and ‘irrationality’. Yet, extra-legal popular violence in the name of justice is a phenomenon that can be found across the globe.1 Regardless the social mecha- nisms by which these acts of violence are produced, and the ways in which they are discursively framed, these practices are deeply puzzling both to peo- ple living in the contexts where they unfold and outside analysts. What pushes people to ‘take the law into their hands’ and kill fellow citizens, sometimes their own neighbours? This article tries to answer this question for one specific context, the territo- ries of Fizi and Uvira located in the province of South Kivu in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (hereinafter the Congo). This area has been plagued by particularly intense dynamics of conflict and violence for well over two decades, and has at present a high incidence of what is called ‘popular in/ justice’ herein. As explained further below, this term was chosen to indicate that these practices are experienced simultaneously as forms of justice and injustice in the contexts where they occur. The Fizi/Uvira area does not appear exceptional for having a high incidence of cases: in several other sites in the eastern Congo where the author has conducted field research, such as Ituri and Rutshuru, popular in/justice is also a recurring practice.2 However, the Fizi/ Uvira region was selected based on the assumption that understanding such a complex phenomenon requires profound contextual knowledge. Given that the author has conducted extensive research in Fizi/Uvira since 2010, it was judged to be the most suitable context for this study. Data were collected in October and November 2014, both by the author and a team of local research- ers specialised in popular in/justice.3 1 E.g., a recent report on racial lynching in the southern United States documents 3,959 victims between 1877 and 1950. Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America. Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (eji, Montgomery, 2015). 2 The author has conducted periodic research in the eastern Congo for various projects since 2010. 3 One team of the Centre Independent de Recherches et d’Études sur le Kivu (cireski), consist- ing of Oscar Dunia Abed and Paul Sungura Tambwe, conducted research on the Lusambo- Makobola axis, while the author and Juvenal Twaibu Bilongwe covered Runingu, Kiliba and Uvira town. Open-ended topic guides were used for group and key informant interviews per village/quarter and per case of popular justice. international journal on minority and group rights 22 (2015) 335-359 Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo 337 Based on the data gathered during the fieldwork, this article explores the main forms and causes of popular in/justice in Fizi/Uvira. In particular, it stud- ies how this phenomenon is shaped by a profound crisis of authority and high levels of local conflictuality, as nourished by limited state effectiveness, milita- risation, and the erosion of the authority of customary chiefs and elders. It shows how these transformations of the socio-political order have created space and incentives for groups with limited access to official political chan- nels, in particular youth, to assert socio-political agency. This includes killings and other damage in the name of justice, conceptualised as practices of ‘order- making’. However, since popular in/justice only further unsettles the political and social order, it reinforces the very conditions in which it thrives. 2 Shifting Authority Structures and the Rise of the Mai-Mai Imaginary The territories of Fizi and Uvira border Rwanda, Burundi and Lake Tanganyika. Reflecting the Kivus’ nature as a mosaic of groups designated as ‘ethnic’, this area is inhabited by dozens of such groups. While Fizi is home to the Babembe, and to a lesser extent to the Banyamulenge, Bafuliiru and several other groups, Uvira is inhabited in majority by the Bafuliiru, but also by the Bavira, Banyamulenge, Barundi and others. While the Fizi/Uvira area has been a peri- odic hotbed of armed activity also before and during colonial times, it is the immediate post-independence forms of armed mobilisation that inspire cur- rent manifestations of armed group activity most directly. Soon after the Congo’s accession to independence in 1960, revolutionary fervour swept the country. It found its first foothold in the east in the Uvira region, giving rise to the Simba rebellion. The constellation of forces that this insurgency drew upon bears resemblance to the drivers of conflict and violence today, especially the manipulation of youth by politicians, contestations around positions of local, often customary, authority, and the salience of discourses of autochthony. The first unrest was triggered by freshly elected provincial Member of Parliament (mp) Musa Marandura, who mobilised youth to agitate against the mwami (customary chief) of the Bafuliiru, accused of complicity with the disliked colo- nial authorities and of having ceded a part of the Bafuliiru’s ancestral territory to the Barundi.4 This last group was portrayed as intruders from neighbouring Burundi who had unjustly been granted a chefferie (customary chiefdom) by 4 B. Verhaegen, Rébellions au Congo (Tome 1) (crisp, ires and inep, Brussels and Leopoldville, 1966). international journal on minority and group rights 22 (2015) 335-359 338 Verweijen the colonial authorities. Such accusations were strongly informed by discourses of autochthony, which posit a dichotomy between, on the one hand, ‘sons or daughters of the soil’/natives and, on the other hand, foreigners/outsiders. In the Congo, the figure of the foreign ‘other’ has often been projected onto Rwandophone groups (speakers of Kinyarwanda and related languages like Kirundi), including the Barundi.5 Similarities between past and present can also be found in relation to armed